News

Welcome to the official site of the International Vladimir Nabokov Society (IVNS)! You can access most of the site as you wish, but to add to or edit material wiki-style, as we would love you to do, you will have to register to the site by following the protocol spelled out below.

The notes to Ada 1.43 have been added to the Annotations section of the website, which also means the notes to Ada 1.41 are now available (with hyperlinks to motifs and illustrations) on AdaOnline. Thanks once again to Steve Blackwell for acting as editor of the new annotations, kindly continuing the momentum of his role as the last editor of the print Nabokovian.

The International Vladimir Nabokov Society, the Société française Vladimir Nabokov and the Nabokov Society of Japan make a joint appeal to Russia's Ministry of Culture in three open letters.

These urgent letters, published at the bottom of this message, were published in an article by Maria Bashmakova in Kommersant. The Ministry's reply to the last letter sent to it by the Vladimir Nabokov Literary Foundation is embedded in this same article.

The Société Française Vladimir Nabokov has hosted yet another magnificent conference, this time at Université Cergy-Pontoise, the Sorbonne, and Musée National de l’Histoire de l’Immigration. Plenary speakers, Isabelle Poulin and Will Norman, delivered fascinating talks on the first two days of the conference and were accompanied by speakers from several generations of Nabokovians. At the Musée National, we listened to a seminal talk on Russian immigration, which disclosed unpublished documents from the Nina Berberova Archives (including letters and notes from Nabokov).

With Zoran Kuzmanovich's permission, I post these birthday greetings for everyone to enjoy, including perhaps Nabokov himself (wherever he might be perched himself):

Happy Birthday to the man whose work makes us attend to the stained glass windows of life while we wait for the right word not only to perch itself on our keyboards but to do so without echoing one of his too obviously. This grateful well-wisher already knows that he did not wait long enough.

The spring issue of The Nabokovian is now posted! A big thank you to Priscilla Meyer, editor of The Nabokovian, and this issue's four contributors: Gerard de Vries, Mary Ross, Frances Peltz Assa and J.B. Geen.

JJ Heckenhauer is a rare bookseller with a tradition for Russian books for more than 50 years. The bookseller has recently acquired a collection with more than 100 titles about Nabokov. The list is attached. If anyone is interested in this collection or thinks their institution might be interested in purchasing it, please contact Roger Sonnewald at ant@heckenhauer.de

The finding aid for the Nabokov family papers and other materials (in Dmitri Nabokov's possession when he died, and donated to Harvard, his alma mater, by the Vladimir Nabokov Literary Foundation) is now complete. The material is open for researchers. There is also an online finding aid.

On the first day of class, one of several with Professor Barabtarlo, he announced that we must read each book twice: The Defense, Master and Margarita, Doctor Zhivago, The First Circle. Once in order to get the gist of the matter, a second time to truly appreciate the artistry. If this would not be feasible for any of us, then it would be perfectly all right to not continue further in the course. One student seated in the back row politely excused himself. And we proceeded.

In my long friendship with Gene we shared various Nabokovian pleasures, the most spine-tingling of which occurred on the Connecticut shore in the 1980s. Gene had come to speak to my seminar at Wesleyan in early March. The next day we went for a long walk along the deserted beach--my husband was leading us to a distant promontory. Along the way Gene picked up one half of a conch shell and I the other; he said: this is the Greek etymology of “symbol” (to throw together), leading me to ask if he’d traced the shell motif through Nabokov’s novels. He hadn’t. I started my catalogue with Speak Memory, where Colette injures her foot on a mussel shell.

There was no one else like Professor Gennady Barabtarlo. I met him in person long after reading his books and profiting by them. The first time I spoke with him was at a dinner party hosted by Brian Boyd and Bronwen Nicolson to celebrate the conclusion of the Nabokov Upside Down Conference in Auckland in 2012. That first conversation took place on a warm and sunny terrace in the very middle of summer.

From the looks of things, I must have met Gene in 1995, at a typically over-endowed conference hotel in Washington, DC. I don't know when or where our first words of greeting were spoken, but I do know that among the earliest were some that immediately highlighted his wry, understated sense of humor:

Dear colleagues, I am pleased to inform you that my book "Прочтение Набокова. Изыскания и материалы" (Ivan Limbakh Publishing House, S.-Petersburg, 2019 http://limbakh.ru/index.php?id=7697) is now available for order from abroad:

Nabokov asserts in Speak, Memory that once something has been seen, there is no unseeing it, and the afterlife of Nabokov’s translations in his compositions lend additional weight to this observation. Stanislav Shvabrin’s Between Rhyme and Reason: Vladimir Nabokov, Translation, and Dialogue explores Nabokov’s life-long involvement with translation as a form of communion with others, and Shvabrin treats Nabokov’s translations as dialogic encounters full of significance for his writings as well as his stance on translation.

Alexey Filimonov, poet, man of letters, translator, and devoted Nabokovian, is happy to announce the publication of his collection of poems Звезда-полынья (Zvezda-polyn'ia). The poems pay tribute to Nabokov, St. Petersburg, the Russian Silver Age, and the poets who fired his imagination.

Princeton University Press has issued a cheap ($17.95, cheap by Princeton standards) paperback of volume 1 of the revised (1975) Nabokov translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, in their new Princeton Classics series, aimed at students; pagination, except for the front matter, remains the same as in previous editions. There is a new foreword by me.

At the beginning of July, Nabokov's 25 readings presented the almanac titled Nabokov's Europe. Alexey Filimonov and Evgeny Lazerow are co-editors of the anthology. The publication consists of two volumes, which include art works by Nabokovians and scientific works, translations of Nabokov's poems, and biographical material. The works of famous and novice Nabokov researchers from different countries are published in Russian and English.

Gennady Barabtarlo's beautifully designed edition of Nabokov on dreams. Its core is Nabokov's 1964-65 experiment of recording his dreams to test J.W. Dunne's An Experiment with Time (1927), to see if any of his dreams were retrospectively precognitive. Also included are other dreams from Nabokov's diaries, and categorized references to dreams in his other work, with GB's commentary, and reflections on dreams, death, and time in Nabokov. Lavishly illustrated with images, especially of Nabokov's index cards and diaries, in the manner of The Original of Laura.

Andrei Babikov's edition of Nabokov's correspondence with his friend Mikhail Karpovich, the Harvard historian of Russia, edited, with full notes, from originals in the Nabokov archive of the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, the Nabokov papers in the Library of Congress, and the Bakhmeteff Archive at Columbia, has recently been published in Russian: